Familiarity and recollection vs representational models of medial temporal lobe structures: a single-case study

We report, in this study, on JMG, a patient who presents highly unusual lesions that completely affected all MTL structures except for the right hippocampus and parts of neighbouring medial parahippocampal cortex. We first demonstrate that JMG shows preserved recall for visual material on 5 experimental tasks. This finding suggests that his right hippocampus is functional, even though it appears largely disconnected from most of its MTL afferents. In contrast, JMG performed very poorly, as compared to control subjects, on 7 tasks of visual recognition memory for single items. Although he sometimes performed above chance, neither familiarity nor recollection appeared fully preserved. These results indicate that extrahippocampal structures, damaged bilaterally in JMG, perform critical operations for item recognition; and that the hippocampus cannot take over that role, including recollection, when these structures are largely damaged. Finally, in a set of 3 recognition memory tasks with scenes as stimuli, JMG performed at the level of control participants and obtained normal indices of familiarity and recollection. Overall, our findings suggest that the right hippocampus and remnants of parahippocampal cortex can support recognition memory for scenes in the absence of preserved item-recognition memory. The patterns of dissociations, which we report in the present study, provide support for a representational account of the functional organization of MTL structures.

Source: Neuropsychologia - July 29, 2017 Category: Neurology Source Type: research